THINK PAIR SHARE (TPS) STRATEGIES AND DIRECTED READING THINKING ACTIVITY (DRTA) TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION ON READING COMPREHENSION
ACHIEVEMENT
Diana Viranthy Surbakti, Jumino Suhadi, Andang Suhendi
Faculty of Literature, Universitas Islam Sumatera Utara Medan, Indonesia
E-mail: dianasurbakti164@gmail.com
Received: 2022-06-23 Accepted: 2022-09-22 Published: 2022-11-29
Abstract
The research deals with teaching strategies and students’ motivation on reading comprehension achievement. The objective of this study is to reveal that the students’ achievement in reading comprehension taught by Think Pair Share is significantly higher than that taught by Directed Reading Thinking Activity using question answer relationship teaching study. The research method used is quantitative research design. The populations of this research are the students of Midwifery Grade II at STIKes Mitra Husada Medan, Academic year 2021/2022. Two classes are randomly selected and the total samplings are 72 students. The instruments used are multiple choice test and questionnaire. The data analyzed are by Two-Way ANOVA with 2x2 factorial designs with F observed = 14.1 and F table = 4.00, and the results indicated the Fobserved > Ftable, so null hypothesis (Ho) was rejected. It is concluded that the students taught by using TPS strategy is better than those taught by using Directed Reading Thinking Activity on reading comprehension achievement. Based on this research, researchers recommend using TPS learning model because this learning model can improve students' ability to solve reading comprehension problems. This model can also be used as an alternative to apply innovative English learning, especially in reading, creating an exciting learning atmosphere, and also providing opportunities for students to express their ideas in English in their own way.
Keywords: motivation; reading comprehension achievement; teaching strategies
1. Introduction
Reading comprehension is very important to be mastered by the students. It is in line with the idea proposed by Alyousef (2005) who defines reading as one of the most significant English skills in supporting people's thinking and as an interactive process between the reader and the text. However, many students are only able to read out aloud some texts with appropriate pronunciation but they do not get the main ideas and the detail information from the text well. This happens because they lack motivation or
information is related to one another in a meaningful way. In addition, the way the teachers teach reading at the school based on the observations of the researchers is still monotonous, as teachers still use traditional teaching strategies by asking the student to read one by one and then giving questions and answers from the text.
The teaching strategies are needed to connect the students’ background knowledge with the new information in given text and to overcome the students’ lack of desire of reading comprehension in order to increase their motivation in reading. There are two teaching strategies which are selected in this study. They are Think Pair Share and Directed Reading Thinking Activity.
Think Pair Share (TPS) is one of the effective teaching strategies because it can help the students solve problems in reading comprehension achievment. Besides, this strategy can improve the students’ communicative skills and make their critical thinking work in pairs. It also gives an opportunity to the students to orrally spring their response with their classmates and recieve valuable feedback. Moreover, this strategy can help the students to increase their motivation especially in reading comprehension achievement.
Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) was developed by Stauffer as a framework for teaching reading, which stresses students’ abilities to read reflectively and to use prediction. This strategy involves the students to be active in making prediction. The teacher can build their prior knowledge by asking them some questions related to reading text. Bos & Richardson (1994) state that the students can get a little information related to their prior knowledge they have already had from the teacher’s questions.
One of the students' deficiencies in reading comprehension is the lack of motivation which is a theoretical construct used to explain the initiation, direction, intensity, presence and quality of behavior, especially goal-directed behavior (Maehr &
Meyer in Brophy, 2010). Motives are hypothetical constructs used to explain why people do what they do. Brophy (2010: 3) also states that motives are hypothetical constructs used to explain why people do what they do. Motives are distinguished from related goals (the immediate objectives of action sequences) and strategies (the methods used to achieve goals and thus to satisfy motives). For example, a person responds to hunger (motive) by going to a restaurant (strategy) to get food (goal).
Furthermore, based on preliminary observation conducted by the researchers as English Lecturer at STIKes Mitra Husada Medan, there are a number of crucial issues concerning the teaching and learning of reading comprehension. Students in this level especially in midwifery have difficulties in identifying the information of reading passage. First, the students could not find specific information which is included in the narrative text given by the teacher. Second, some students always feel bored when they are studying reading because they do not know the language feature and generic structure to understand the reading material easily especially in narrative text. Third, the students are lack of vocabulary, and they have low motivation.
Therefore, this study is focused on teaching strategies and students motivation on reading comprehension achievement of the students at Midwifery Grade II at STIKes Mitra Husada Medan, Academic year 2021/2022.. The objective of this study is to explain the students achievement in reading comprehension taught by Think Pair Share and Directed Reading Thinking Activity.
2. Literature Review
Blachowicz & Olge (2008) argue that reading comprehension is a complex process that demands skills and strategies. Reading comprehension is an evaluating process.Reading has different levels of comprehension. Each level of comprehension has its own indicators to be accessed by the teachers (Day & Park, 2005). The achievement of those indicators will be reflected by the students’ ability to master skills in each level of comprehension. The skills in each level are explained in the following:
1) literal comprehension, 2) inferential comprehension, 3) critical comprehension and 4) creative comprehension
Haris et al. (2007: 8) add 6 processes in reading comprehension, namely cognitive process, micro process, integrative process, macro process, elaborative process and metacognitive process. Reading comprehension is the process of making meaning from the text. The goal, therefore, is to gain an overall understanding of what is described in the text rather than to obtain meaning from isolated words or sentences.
In understanding text information, children develop mental models or representations of meaning of the text ideas during the reading process (Woolley, 2011: 15).
There are many types of text. Each type has different advantages and disadvantages for the reader. It depends on what type of reading that will used by the reader to read a text. Patel and Praveen (2008: 117) say that there are some types of reading: a. intensive reading, b. extensive reading c. aloud reading, and the last silent reading.
Strategies are defined as certain ways, steps, or techniques used in teaching and learning process for the students in order to solve some problems. After the problem- solving is done, the strategies will automatically build up a better learning for the students.
Think Pair Share (TPS) was developed by Lyman in 1978 (McTighe & Lyman, 1988) for the first time. It has been observed through various researches on educational teaching from the basic to the university levels. This strategy is a part of cooperative learning. To make a case for collaborative learning seems easy.
Kagan (2009) states that there are five steps in TPS, they are as follows:
a. Organizing students into pairs by dividing the students into pairs randomly. The purpose of choosing randomly is to avoid the gap between high students and low students.
b. The topic or a question is given to the students. The question should be in general topic and has many kinds of answers. This makes the students think deeper and deeper, and they can give their opinions from many aspects.
c. Giving time to the students to think meanwhile the teacher should give the students several minutes to think an answer of the question given before.
d. Asking students to discuss with their partner and share their thinking. In this section, each student share his or her own answer to his or her partner in pairs. They share their thinking and discuss each other to find the best answer.
e. Calling on a few students to share their ideas with the rest of the class. This last step is calling some students to share their ideas with the rest of the class. Some students give their answers, and the others can give their opinions or other answers.
TPS technique has some advantages, such as:
b. Waiting time not only offers time for linguistic interpretation of the question but also response formation.
c. Pairing with another student gives an opportunity to orally share their response with a classmate and receive valuable feedback.
However, TPS technique also has some disadvantages, such as:
a. Not all students focus on the topic given, because they can share everything with their partner out of the topic (question) given.
b. There is a possibility that the students who have low understanding about the topic given likely chat to the other pairs
El-Koumy (2006: 3) states that the Direct Reading Thinking Activity is defined operationally as a reading strategy which consists of 6 steps. According to El-Koumy (2006: 3), the steps of Direct Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) are as follows:
1. The teacher writes the title of the reading passage on the board and asks the students to read it,
2. The teacher asks the students to make predictions about the title using these questions:
a) What do you think of a passage with a title like this might be about?
b) Why do you think so?
3. The teacher lists predictions on the board and initiates a discussion with the students by asking them to respond to the following questions:
a. Which of these predictions do you think would be the likely one?
b. Why do you think this prediction is a good one?
4. The teacher invites students to work in small groups to complete the discussion following the same format.
5. The teacher asks students to read the passage silently and to confirm or reject their own predictions. Then he asks them the following questions:
a) Are you correct? b) What do you think now? c) Why do you think so?
6. The teacher asks students to reflect on their predictions through responding to the following questions:
a) What prediction have you made?
b) What makes you think of this prediction?
c) What in the passage supports this prediction?
d) Do you still agree with this prediction? Why?
The advantages of DRTA are as follows:
a. Students – centric: This encourages critical thinking in students, and gives them a chance to come forward and demosntrate what they have learned.
b. Raising the Bar: Educators have they liberty to set up classroom and devise method that would aid all students in thinking,analyzing and comprehending the teaching contents easily.
c. Meeting the needs and interests of diverse learners.
d. Providing the opportunity for students to learn at their own pace, in their own way.
e. Recognizing students’ various background knowledge, readiness, language, preferences in learning.
The disadvantages of DRTA are as follows:
a. Time constraints and chopped-up schedules are obstacles.
b. Class size and teaching load are two of the bigger constraints.
c. Teacher’s preparation might not be full.
The characteristics of students with low motivation are :
1) Students may be easily distracted when listening to their teacher or completing assigments on which they are working.
2) Students may find it difficult to get started on their homework or other class project.
3) Students may not put much effort into assigments and they may find in difficult to participate in class and to stay focused on learning information being taught.
4) Students are more likely to blame someone or something else for their poor performances.
On the other hand, the characteristics of highly-motivated students towards learning are:
1) Likely having a stronger desire to learn.
2) Focusing on goals to stay commited to putting fort the effort and doing what is neccesary to benefit from school.
3) More likely to work hard at participating in their classes and at learning the material presented.
4) More likely to keep working in the face of difficulties when trying to understand a concept or complete a long, complex assigment.
5) Tending to see success as a function of their effort.
6) Understanding that there are factors they cannot control, and focussing on the controllable factors.
2. Research Method
2.1 Participant and setting
The participants consisted of 72 students of Grade II Midwifery Diploma III Study Program. They were in experimental and control groups at STIKes Mitra Husada Medan.
2.2 Instrument
The instrument applied in the present study was multiple choice as pre test and post test. In adiition, the data in the second part of the research were collected through a questionnaire. The questionnaire was administrated and piloted before the study started, both valid and reliable; therefore, the result of it was reported in data analysis section.The questionnaire consisted of 20 statements. Each item of the questionnaire was rated on five points from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
2.3 Design
The design of this research was quantitative instrument to collect the data using post test and the second part was collected through a questionnaire considered as a quantitative data collection.
2.4 Procedure
In the first session, the researchers generally talked about TPS and DRTA and their effect on reading comprehension achievement. In the second session, the instruction of TPS and DRTA started. At the beginning of every session, each strategy was defined together with its advantages and effect on writing improvement. Then several examples were written on the board and then a task was given to them during three other sessions. In each session, the participants had 60 minutes to do the task of 30 multiple choice questions.
4. Discussion
The research is conducted to reveal whether there are any significant effects of the students’ reading comprehension achievement taught by using TPS and DRTA strategies. To answer this question, the researchers ran the independent sample t-test.
This research was conducted in three meetings. From all the meetings conducted, it was found that the students’ score kept improved from pre test and post test. The improvement of the students’ score in each test can be seen from differences among lowest and highest scores.
4.1 Students’ Achievement in Reading Comprehension Taught by Using Think Pair Share is higher than that by Directed Reading Thinking Activity Strategy
In the beginning, students did not have much understanding of all the four stages of TPS. During the first week of the class, a teacher explained TPS stages to students.
The teacher also trained the students an easy paragraph. The students read the paragraph in short time in two to three minutes to understand the entire paragraph in pairs then if the students did not understand the context, then their teacher told them to underline the difficult words. And after that, their teacher encouraged the peers to explain what they were thinking about the text and shared with other groups in class if the peer did not know either about the story, and then their teacher explained the conclusion of the story to them. The same strategy was used for all the three stages to train the students. As a result, the students could use these strategies effectively by themselves as seen in the following table:
Class Interval Absolute frequency Relative Frequency
1 70-73 6 16.67
2 74-77 5 13.89
3 78-81 5 13.89
4 82-85 12 33.33
5 86-90 8 22.22
Total 36 100.00
Table 4.1: Frequency Distribution of Students’ Achievement in Reading Comprehension Taught by Using Think Pair Share Strategy
4.2 Students’ Achievement with High Motivation is higher than that with Low Motivation in Reading Comprehension
Students who had low learning motivation could not activate and energize their cognitive process in their reading comprehension class because they did not have positive attitude towards the learning situation. Besides, they expended less effort in learning the language, which consequently could impact their achievement in reading
comprehension. The calculation result of Two Ways ANOVA indicated both learning motivation significantly affected students’ achievement in reading comprehension.
Total means make it clear that students with high learning motivation have better learning achievement in reading comprehension than that with low motivation. It is clearly presented in the table below:
Class Interval Absolute frequency Relative Frequency
1 60-63 2 5.56
2 64-67 1 2.78
3 68-71 10 27.78
4 72-75 9 25.00
5 76-79 10 27.78
6 80-83 4 11.11
Total 36 100.00
Table 4.2: Frequency Distribution of Students’ Achievement in Reading Comprehension Taught by Using Directed Reading Thinking Activity
4.3 The Interaction of Reading Strategies and Students’ Motivation on Students’
Achievement in Reading Comprehension
The result of Two Ways ANOVA calculation indicates that there is significant effect on the interaction between reading strategies and students’ learning motivation.
Reading strategies and motivation are two of several important factors that influence learning achievement. The calculation shows that students who have high motivation and are taught by Think Pair Share (TPS) and the students who have high motivation taught by using Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) have the most significant difference among others. It means that both strategies are better to be applied for students who have high learning motivation as seen in the table below:
Class Interval Absolute frequency Relative Frequency
1 60-66 4 11.11
2 67-73 5 13.89
3 74-80 2 5.56
4 81-87 11 30.56
5 88-94 7 19.44
6 95-101 7 19.44
Total 36 100.00
Table 4.3: Frequency Distribution of Students’ Achievement in Reading Comprehension with High Motivation
5. Conclusion
Based on the data analysis and hypothesis testing, some conclusions are drawn up as follows:
1. Students’ achievement in reading comprehension taught by using Think Pair Share got the average score = 80,47 and students achievement in reading comprehension taught by using Directed Reading Thinking Activity got average score = 73.75.
first hypothesis of this research which stated that the students’ achievement in reading comprehension taught by using Think pair Share is higher than those taught by using Directed Reading Thinking Activity strategy is really true.
2. Students’ achievement in reading comprehension with high motivation got the average score = 83.61 and students’ achievement in reading comprehension with low motivation got the average score = 79.53. The data indicated that Fobserved = 41.26 and Ftable = 3.98, and result indicated the Fobserved> Ftable so null hypothesis (H0) was rejected and it can be concluded that the second hypothesis of this research which stated that students’ achievement in reading comprehension with high motivation is higher than those with low motivation is really true.
3. The summary of ANOVA indicated that F observed = 14.81 and Ftable = 3.98, and result indicated the Fobserved > Ftable so null hypothesis (H0) was rejected and it can be concluded that the third hypothesis of this research which state there is interaction between Think Pair Share Strategy, Directed Reading Thinking Activity and learning motivation to the students achievement in reading comprehension is really true.
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